Blog Highlight: Scarlet Umbrella

As I cruise the internet, I like to highlight blogs I follow that have great potential (at least IMHO). I came across this blog today, Scarlet Umbrella, authored by Susy Doyle. Susy is blogging her Tablet PC experience. What I especially like about Susy’s experience thus far, is that she is making really great use of a Compaq TC1000, which was my first (and in many ways favorite) tablet. Just goes to show you that powerful CPU, etc. is not what makes a tablet PC useful, it is the individual and their ability to adapt to the device. I know tons of people with great and powerful tablets who are not making near the effort, or achieving half the result that it appears Susy is. Here is a bit about Susy from her bio:

“Susy Doyle is a graduate student in chemistry. When she is not in the lab doing research, her interests include progressive politics, film, and gadgets. She speaks German and English and is currently working on learning Irish and Japanese. She has also studied linguistics and is fascinated by internet language and culture. She is deluded enough to call herself a writer”.

With that bio, one would assume some intelligence! Susy proves it as she works on adapting the tablet PC into her professional and personal life.

“I work in a lab and part of our weekly group meetings is the discussion of scientific papers. Due to various reasons, my colleague giving the presentation was unable to send us a copy of the paper she was discussing until last night which meant I didn’t get the email until this morning. Since I am in a lab, our “IT person” also has a full-time job as a grad student. The rest of us try to help but with so many people using the computers, having a duel Mac-PC environment, and machines runnings both Windows NT and XP, the network often acts like it is possessed. Needless to say, I couldn’t print the paper. Luckily, I had my tablet PC so I was able to use a neat program called PDF Annotator to markup the paper with highlights and notes from the pen (I am one of those people who needs to scribble notes on everything they read to fully comprehend it). I wrote up an agenda of the points I wanted to discuss in the meeting using OneNote and a meeting stationary and I was able to have one tool to bring to the meeting instead of my agenda, notepad, and the paper (which is nice if the meeting is down three flights of stairs). Very cool”.